Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter most.

— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

CLIMATE 101

For those of us already schooled in the monumental threat of human-caused climate change, the imminent need to question our status quo is largely self-evident.

For others, the term climate change can be shrouded in the same kind of mystery that funny words like capitalism are. The misnomer that climate change is difficult to understand is a strange one because nearly 100% of the world’s scientistshave reached consensus about what causes climate change and have meticulously researched and documented its injurious impacts.

While world leaders began awakening to the threat of climate change at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, this marks a new beginning and not an end in the pathway to climate progress. Even with some global leaders advocating for climate change action, there are many others who are actively working to derail these efforts. The derailment camp includes powerful interests that profit from our business-as-usual and stave off attempts to tackle climate change in a substantive manner.

Some of these special interests go so far as to propagate mistruths on the matter: there are over 90 climate change counter-movement organizations in the U.S. with a cumulative annual income of more than $900 million. To better understand the underpinnings of numbers such as these, A Rebel’s Handbook argues that capitalism itself is integrally linked with our failure to achieve meaningful climate solutions.